I’m genuinely surprised that they haven’t really expanded more on battle pets.
Especially in the mobile department, they could be a fun little phone game.
Maybe they have PTSD from the Diablo thing, but that was only because people were expecting PC stuff.
If you could skip animations it might be.
At this point any challenging pet battle content devolves into internet research because of the overwhelming number of options and how long it takes to sit around watching the same animations a billion times.
And I think some of the pet dungeons need to be more non linear theme park adventures instead of linear iron man competitions where failure at the end means starting over.
There is a cheese meta, true. Half the pet battles in the game can be won by using the Valkyrie+Ikky combo. But the breed system makes things slightly complex. The celestial tournament will defeat most people using incorrect breeds. Fact is the harder pet battles pretty much necessitates using meta comps. The aforementioned being a perfect example. But I don’t see it that differently to high end raiding, pvp or m+. People be using meta comps in all of those as well.
^This a million times.
The sheer magnitude of pets and abilities makes finding the ones you actually need exclusively in-game akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack. Over time you’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Some pets classed as weak to an enemy type may actually be the pet you need due to synergies with your damage dealing pet etc. But no one is gonna sift through the sheer magnitude of trial and error needed to work that out. They’re gonna alt tab to a site that just straight up tells them what to use.
This is part of the reason why I think pet battling should actually be made simpler still. How? Delete levels from pets. Pet leveling needs to go away. There’s a reason why pets have been capped at level 25 for multiple expansions. Because Blizz knows I’m right.
Nah pokemon I liked because the creatures are unique with personality
(at least their sprites were before 3d models drained the life out of them)
I can name maybe 10 wow pets I own.
I don’t like the pokemon stuff but the pet battles in wow are fairly well done and executed.
To the guy above me I can almost remember just by looking at all the pets where I got them. Normally my memory is awful but for some reason I remember pointless stuff like that.
Pokemon relies on character design and pageantry.
An infected squirrel in WoW being able to solo a legendary is the stuff I live for.
Pokemon is more fun. Since the entire game is focused on it.
Also pokemon has ways to make even weak pokemon viable for stuff like pvp is you make a group around them. Wow is more niche comp like, and the battles require niche strategies since they changed how epic and legendary pets work in MoP.
I’ve played competitive Pokemon and have never had to care about IV’s even at tournaments.
WoW?
I can’t even use the pets I like, and the breeds are hidden - and shouldn’t exist when there’s thousands of pets in the first place.
I swept local convention tournaments with a Venomoth. I’d rather do stuff like that.
Pokemon will always be more fun because you can play what you want and make it work. WoW forces you to play the things you don’t want to progress in many cases.
It ain’t fun.
Still interesting to whip out Tyreal on a Darkness team during pet battle week sometimes though for random PvP.
ehhh on the surface the setups would look the same but you’d be surprised how different they may have been from the ev training to the moves
I’ve said this for a long time. Wow pet battles are so awesome, they should turn it into a mobile game connected to your account.
Pokemon is the full game so it has to be more complex, though.
Gamefreak is notoriously decadent. They add features, even QoL of simple fun stuffy just to take it away next game. They haven’t updated animations or graphics and do simple stuff. They finally have an open world game coming out and they removed core features that were in every Pokemon game (held items, breeding etc). Allegedly even battles won’t be a thing 
Gamefreak owning Pokemon is the biggest curse
I dont like the computer, it always heals to full near death or kills my guy in 2 moves. Impossible to win. In pokemin you have a chance at least.
I’ve a daughter into Pokemon. Like REALLY into it.
It’s a far more interesting and complex system than WoW pet battles. Even I sit and watch her play some of the Switch games sometimes.
WoW pet battles were a huge mistake. It’s probably an idea that someone was super enthusiastic about, that should have been shot down in as polite a way as possible.
For starters Pet Battling inherently degrades the brand. There’s no way around this, it simply does. It’s immersion breaking and overtly based off of a childrens game, which doesn’t fit in WoW let alone an MMO. Secondly it was done pretty poorly, it’s a rock paper scissors sort of system with less intricacy than the product it’s ripping off.
So yeah, huge mistake.
I do not play pokemon so I cannot make a comparison if one game is more fun than the other. Since returning to WOW in 2019, the battle pet system has been my favorite part of WOW.
I love hunting & catching the most potentially competitive wild pets, I enjoy learning about the complexities of the game, and find the process of creating teams that are competitive in my battle group both challenging & satisfying.
I haven’t played Pokemon since Gameboy days 
This opinion is probably not that uncommon.
I dunno, my main problem with Pokemon was that Parasect was my favorite pokemon but he only had limited utility. I see the same thing happening in this game, the pets I choose for my roster are generally ones I liked their theme (like pinchy, zomstrok, juvenile brineshell) but let me tell you that team is practically trash.
Yet I refuse to level or otherwise participate in the pet battle meta. I fight the pets that are my favorites, how they do is up to fate. I’m not going to start using a bunch of meta-strongs just to get the win, literally nothing to do with those tokens than level something you like, or I guess level something that will whup rear end.
it is
because reasons
Pet battles are boring and unimaginative/basically a dead feature in this game. It isn’t remotely close to the same level of Pokémon. If you truly believe it can ever be compared then you a truly delusional.
Pokémon has cards/Show/Pokémon go/E sport scene. We have pet battles in a dead game shunned by the gaming industry as a whole.